Friday, April 13, 2012

This is another in a series of posts about our trip this week to Arizona and Nevada. While taking a river cruise in Laughlin we heard the tour narrator talk about Oatman, AZ, an old mining town not far from Laughlin that features some stores, Indian jewelry, and free-roaming burros who are descendants of pack animals that were released into the wild by miners many years ago. It sounded like it would be interesting, so we decided to make the 28 mile drive up there before heading home.

A few pictures first:

One of the town's claim to fame is the fact that on March 18, 1939 Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon night in the Oatman Hotel after being married in Kingman.

Apparently they were frequent visitors to the town where they could enjoy some solitude and Gable would play cards with the miners.

We got there a little early. Many of the stores weren't open and the ones that were were not too impressive. There was some nice leather stuff, knives and such, but it seemed that most of the stuff being sold was either cheap tourist crap, Route 66 souvenirs, or low-brow humor novelty crap. It certainly wasn't what we expected and it wasn't worth the twisty drive up old Route 66 to get there.

What about burros? Well, there was one that must have had the official greeter duty and was standing right in the middle of the main street:

We decided to cut our losses and start home, but what we didn't expect was a gang of burros 1/4 mile out of town preventing our exit:

I was able to drive around them but got a stern look from the boss burro: